When You Ask...

Choose your forum carefully

Be sensitive in choosing where you ask your question. You are likely to be ignored, or written off as a loser, if you:

• post your question to a forum where it's off topic
  
  
• post a very elementary question to a forum where advanced technical questions are expected, or vice-versa
  
  
• cross-post to many different forums.
  
  
• post a personal e-mail to somebody who is neither an acquaintance of yours nor personally responsible for solving your problem

The first step, therefore, is to find the right forum. Shooting off a private message or e-mail to a member which you are not familiar with is risky at best. For example, do not assume that the author of an informative article or blog entry on the site wants to be your free consultant. Do not make optimistic guesses about whether your question will be welcome if you're unsure; send it elsewhere, or refrain from sending it at all. Don't shotgun-blast all the available help channels at once, that's like yelling and irritates people. Step through them.

Use meaningful, specific subject headers

The subject header is your golden opportunity to attract qualified experts' attention in around 50 characters or fewer. Don't waste it on babble like "Please help me" (let alone "PLEASE HELP ME!!!!"; messages with subjects like that get discarded by reflex). Don't try to impress us with the depth of your anguish; use the space for a super-concise problem description instead. More generally, imagine looking at the index of an archive of questions, with just the subject lines showing. Make your subject line reflect your question well enough that the next guy searching the archive with a question similar to yours will be able to follow the thread to an answer rather than posting the question again. Do not simply hit reply to a list message in order to start an entirely new thread. This will limit your audience.

Make it easy to reply

Finishing your query with "Please send your reply to..." makes it quite unlikely you will get an answer. In discussion threads, asking for a reply by e-mail is outright rude, unless you believe the information may be sensitive (and somebody will, for some unknown reason, let you but not the whole forum know it). If you want an e-mail copy when somebody replies in the thread, request that the Web forum send it; this feature is supported. Write in clear, grammatical, correctly-spelled language.

We've found by experience that people who are careless and sloppy writers are usually also careless and sloppy at thinkers (often enough to bet on, anyway). Answering questions for careless and sloppy thinkers is not rewarding; we'd rather spend our time elsewhere.

So, expressing your question clearly and well is important. If you can't be bothered to do that, we can't be bothered to pay attention. Spend the extra effort to polish your language. It doesn't have to be stiff or formal. In fact, slinger culture values informal, slangy and humorous language used with precision. But it has to be precise; there has to be some indication that you're thinking and paying attention. Spell, punctuate, and capitalize correctly. Don't TYPE IN ALL CAPS; this is read as shouting and considered rude. (All-smalls is only slightly less annoying, as it's difficult to read.)

More generally, if you write like a semi-literate boob you will very likely be ignored. Writing like a kiddie is the absolute kiss of death and guarantees you will receive nothing but stony silence (or, at best, a heaping helping of scorn and sarcasm) in return. If you are asking questions in a forum that does not use your native language, you will get a limited amount of slack for spelling and grammar errors but no extra slack at all for laziness (and yes, most can usually spot that difference). Also, unless you know what your respondent's languages are, write in English. Busy people tend to simply flush questions in languages they don't understand, and English is the working language of the Internet. By writing in English you minimize your chances that your question will be discarded unread.

Don't claim that you have found a bug

When you are having problems with a piece of software, don't claim you have found a bug unless you are very, very sure of your ground. This applies to webpages and documentation, too. Remember, there are many other users that are not experiencing your problem. The people who wrote the software work very hard to make it work as well as possible. If you claim you have found a bug, you'll be impugning their competence, which may offend some of them even if you are correct. It's especially undiplomatic to yell "bug" in the Subject line.

When asking your question, it is best to write as though you assume you are doing something wrong, even if you are privately pretty sure you have found an actual bug. If there really is a bug, you will hear about it in the answer. Play it so the maintainers will want to apologize to you if the bug is real, rather than so that you will owe them an apology if you have messed up.

Grovelling is not a substitute for doing your homework

Some people who get that they shouldn't behave rudely or arrogantly, demanding an answer, retreat to the opposite extreme of grovelling. "I know I'm just a pathetic newbie loser, but...". This is distracting and unhelpful. It's especially annoying when it's coupled with vagueness about the actual problem. Don't waste your time, or ours, on crude primate politics. Instead, present the background facts and your question as clearly as you can. That is a better way to position yourself than by grovelling.

<< Page 2: Before You Ask | Page 4: When You Ask (part 2) >>

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